Sanaa Farooqi

SAE Institute Glasgow

“How do plot twists affect the success of a movie, TV show or video game?”

Sanaa Farooqi

Student No.: 96292

18T3_CMN4200_CMN4200.1_96292_Farooqi

Date of Submission: 30/11/18

2,275 Words

I hereby declare that this is my own work,and does not use any materials other than cited sources and tools. All explanations that I copied directly or in essence are marked as such. This work has not been previously submitted.

………………………………………. 30/11/18, Glasgow, Sanaa Farooqi

1 CONTENTS

Intro - What’s a Twist? 3

Trope Subversion 3

Murder Mystery and Red Herrings 7

Conclusion 7

REFERENCES 8

BIBLIOGRAPHY 8

APPENDICES 9

Intro - What’s a Twist?

A plot twist is, to put it in its simplest form, an extreme change in a piece of media’s narrative or outcome. (Singleton, Conrad and Healy, 2000). This is reserved for fictional works - one can’t exactly rewrite real events to make them more shocking. Plot twists are usually used to subvert people’s expectations of a piece of media, or can turn a piece of media on its head, making it much more than initially meets the eye. These can be found in any and all media that tells a story, even in music. However, for this paper, the focus will be on movies, TV shows, and videogames.

There are a multitude of twists that are found. Feeding the player or viewer irrelevant information to cause them to draw incorrect conclusions of a story, also commonly known as a red herring. Some stories may withhold a vital piece of information from the viewer, until a specific point of the movie, and once this is revealed, the perception of the media piece can change radically on repeated viewings or playthroughs. An example of this can be found in The Sixth Sense (1999).

Other stories take a risk, and completely subvert the genre that they present themselves as. I will be elaborating on two examples of these in my paper. The term can also be known as “Bait-and-Switch”, where viewers or players are lured into a piece of media for what it is on the surface, and then it is sooner or later switched for another genre.

Trope Subversion

People take the risk of subverting people’s expectations for a number of reasons. It can keep people engaged in the storyline, and keep the concepts fresh in a viewer or player’s mind. Some media takes this to the extremes, completely shifting its tone later down the line, thus risking losing a large amount of its viewership if executed poorly.

One video game which risked such a twist was Doki Doki Literature Club (Team Salvato, 2017). The game was released on Steam’s online game platform for free in September 2017. It played as a traditional Visual Novel type video game.

For the uninformed, a Visual Novel is a genre of game which is text-driven, using additional assets such as images of characters (typically in an anime style) and

3 detailed backgrounds to tell their stories.The stories tend to have branching narratives, depending on choices the player makes at key moment in the game. (Cavallaro, 2010) A common subgenre of the Visual Novel is the Dating Simulator. Doki Doki Literature Club placed itself onto store shelves, marketing itself as one of these Dating Simulators, presenting players with cute anime-styled girls and the choice to romance any they choose. The incentive of a free game had the opportunity to bring in even more than those who normally played Visual Novels.

Fig 3. The main cast of the game. From left to right: Sayori, Yuri, Monika and Natsuki. (Team Salvato, 2017)

The game is approximately 4 hours long (howlongtobeat.com, 2018). However, it uses the majority of its time, approximately half a playthrough on the part of the game known as Act 1. This part consistently plays out as a traditional visual novel, with options to hang out with whichever girl the player prefers, and grow a bond with them.

The first twist in this game, comes from the end of the first act, where the main character’s childhood friend, Sayori, is revealed to have been suffering from crippling depression. Even where the usual Power of Love trope would pull through and save her from this, it simply doesn’t. Dan Salvato, the writer of the game stated in a Reddit AMA: “I have used real-life experiences as the basis for Sayori's behavior.” (Slavato, 2017). Unfortunately, the gravity of the character’s situation spirals further, and soon she’s found hanging from the ceiling, dead.

From here, the game takes a turn for the worse, which will be elaborated on later. The same downhill slope can be found not just in video games, but in television too.

4 School-Live! (Studio Lerche, 2015) was an anime that provided a similar bait-and-switch. The anime contained 12 episodes to tell its story, which, is approximately gives the viewer about 4 hours to view the story that occurs. [Appendix A]. The anime revolves around a group of high school girls partaking in a “School Living Club” where they live in school.

As the show opens, the viewer is greeted to an upbeat song, with colourful visuals, setting a cheery tone for the show. We are treated to the life for one of the main characters, Yuki, in her happy, upbeat world where she hangs around with her fellow classmates, and pet dog. As the episode progresses, we watch the escapades of Yuki chasing down her dog. Finally, as the episode draws to its final minutes, we view the world through another character’s viewpoint, and finally, the true nature of the show is revealed. The world isn’t happy-go-lucky, and instead, this is a story of survivors in a zombie apocalypse. The view that had been seen throughout the episode was a delusion of the main character’s.

Fig. 1 - First two minutes of episode 1 (Studio Lerche, 2015)

Fig. 2 - Final two minutes of episode 1 (Studio Lerche, 2015)

5 As seen here, in the above two figures, the mood of the show takes a very quick turn for the worst. The mood of fig. 2 represents how School-Live! plays out from that point of the episode until the end of the series.

Setting a major twist so early may be considered ‘playing it safe’. As the twist in the series is revealed so soon, it means that those who have felt betrayed by the cutesy style of the anime can stop watching, knowing the show’s true colours, without being too invested.

This strongly contrasts Doki Doki Literature Club’s premise. The game relies on you becoming comfortable and well-acquainted with the game world, before subverting the traditional Dating Simulator tropes one anticipates. It plays upon the bond it tries to form between the player and its characters, and once it does so, it breaks down the safeguard these games usually have, bringing in very real and serious topics, before putting the player on edge through sudden sounds and abnormal movements in the game. Word of the game’s sudden downward spiral spread fast, and thanks to the fact the software was free, Doki Doki Literature Club culminated over 3 million downloads, as stated in a Tweet by Team Salvato. (Twitter.com, 2018)

The reasons for making the game free, as stated by Dan Salvato, “Two reasons. One because I knew it would attract the attention of a lot of people who would never pay a cent for an anime romance game. Two, because I felt that it would be wrong to sell a game that is simply not what is being advertised.” (Salvato. 2017). Despite the game being available for free, Team Salvato had also established ways for players to support the game, and thus the team were able to be rewarded for their efforts through other means, such as purchasing the game’s soundtrack.

As Salvato states in a Reddit AMA, video games provide the user with something that film and TV cannot - direct input on a situation. “I wanted to help demonstrate the capabilities of interactive fiction, providing some kind of experiences that only a video game could provide.” (Salvato, 2017). Even when a format of video game such as a Visual Novel provides less input than traditional games, they can move at a player’s own pace, and react to a player’s input. Players can project themselves onto their character, which immerses them into the game world. When a player is making their own choices, it becomes easier to project, in comparison to trying to identify with a character in a film, who may do things that one may end up objecting to in the end.

School-Live!, being an anime, also had the problem of being aired weekly, meaning that viewers had to wait for each episode, and if made to keep waiting, the interest in the series pre-twist may have died down. However, moving straight to the punch served it well.Iits online premiere on Nico Nico Douga culminated over three million views, and with the saturation of anime growing steadily [App. B], it was important to leave an impact with viewers immediately, as to not be overshadowed by other weekly shows at the time.

Though the two series had similar, dark twists, the position of the twist was placed in a way that would give them more impact in their respective industries. And as shown, both had proven to be successful.

An anime that tried to do a dark twist near the end, was School Days (2007), which soon became infamous for its surprise end, but before such, the show was poorly received previously, and lost most of its viewership in the process. As such, School-Live! Jumped right to the punch, and its success sparked a ten-time increase in the manga of the same name’s sales.

Murder Mystery and Red Herrings

As much as unexpected twists may prove to provide an interesting journey for a viewer or player, there’s certain genres where twists and turns are par for the course. In particular, murder mysteries.

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc (Spike Chunsoft, 2010) is a murder mystery visual novel, placing you in the role of Makoto Naegi, who, along with the other 15 people in his class, have been mysteriously locked in their school. They are told that the only way out is to get away with murder, and so the game begins. Danganronpa is split into two main sections, one where the player is allowed to interact with the other characters in the game, and then the inevitable part where the player must investigate the murder of their peers. With no way of knowing who may die, and who may be the culprit, the player is to make friends with their fictional peers at their own risk.

Murders in the game are intricately planned, and while they do not change on replays of the game, it is up to the player to figure out exactly what happened, and who did it. They are then thrown into what are called “Class Trials” to debate with their peers and reach a conclusion. There are many points within the game, where the player can be mislead, and forced to reroute their thoughts. Being directly included means that the game only progresses alongside the player, and should ensure that they are not lost within the trial (granted, that they aren’t simply blindly guessing).

In the form of film, it is much harder to ensure that the viewer is up to date with what is occuring. Clue (1985), was an extremely fast-paced comedic murder mystery, which had the unique twist of having three different endings - a different ending was shown at different theatres. The movie’s plot played out, and the butler in the movie summarises all the occurences, before revealing the murderer. The concept of the endings changing was rather novel, however, due to the fact, the occurences in the movie itself were forced to stay extremely open-ended, thus making it harder for a viewer to try and figure out on their own.

However, while the main driving point of Danganronpa is to have the player figure out the crimes, in Clue, it could be argued that there’s much more enjoyment in being told who had done it all along - leaving a mystery that’s very hard to explain, and having the audience realise how everything fits in once the reveal has been set in place. This simply wouldn’t work in a video game of similar genre, as it purposefully prevents a player from reaching their objective, which may prove more frustrating. To balance this, Danganronpa does not obscure any of the happenings, within reason. Evidence is always aplenty, and in future installments of the game franchise, players are even able to make accusations faster, granted they have the correct evidence on hand. This

7 provides an extra incentive for players to try their best to solve the case, where this incentive wouldn’t lie in film.

Upon release, Clue was poorly received, and in fact, did not manage to break even with its budget in box office sales. Despite the incentive to watch the film for the multiple endings, critics found such to be too gimmicky to actually warrant multiple viewings of the movie. (Metacritic, n.d) The concept of having multiple plot twists likely lessened the effect of the ending that one would view in the theatre, knowing that it was not a true conclusion.

On the opposite side of the coin, Danganronpa was extremely well received, with its story and gameplay garnering it an 80% review score on Metacritic. It was praised for how it used its concept of murder mystery to tell a story which kept players engaged at every turn, with a story that, much like Doki Doki Literature Club could only be told through video games.

Conclusion While it can be risky to implement full-on subversions of media, games such as Doki Doki Literature Club show us that when a subversion such as this is executed well, it can gain a following, even outside of the intended demographic. Atop that, even when twists are to be expected, the most important part is to make them impactful, as Danganronpa had done. In contrast to Clue before it, which accidentally lessened the effects of its narrative through use of a ‘gimmick’.

8 REFERENCES Singleton, R., Conrad, J. and Healy, J. (2000). Filmmaker's dictionary. 2nd ed. Hollywood, CA: Lone Eagle Pub. Co., p.229. Salvato, D. (2017). Hello, my name is Dan Salvato. I created Doki Doki Literature Club. AMA. [online] Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/DDLC/comments/7dvb70/hello_my_name_is_dan_salvato_i_ created_doki_doki/ [Accessed 27 Nov. 2018]. Studio Lerche (2015). SCHOOL-LIVE!. [video] Available at: https://www.crunchyroll.com/school-live/more [Accessed 29 Nov. 2018]. Studio Lerche (2015). SCHOOL-LIVE! Episode 1 – Beginning. [image] Available at: https://www.crunchyroll.com/school-live/episode-1-beginning-682347 [Accessed 29 Nov. 2018]. Studio Lerche (2015). SCHOOL-LIVE! Episode 1 – Beginning. [image] Available at: https://www.crunchyroll.com/school-live/episode-1-beginning-682347 [Accessed 29 Nov. 2018]. Team Salvato (2018). Team Salvato on Twitter. [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/TeamSalvato/status/970018054141755392 [Accessed 30 Nov. 2018]. Cavallaro, D. (2010). Anime and the Visual Novel. 1st ed. London: Mc Farland & Company Inc., Publishers, p.8. Team Salvato (2017) Doki Doki Literature Club! [image]. Available at: http://ddlc.moe/ [Accessed 30 Nov. 2018].Screenshot by Author. Howlongtobeat.com. (2018). How long is Doki Doki Literature Club!? - HLTB. [online] Available at: https://howlongtobeat.com/game.php?id=49377 [Accessed 30 Nov. 2018]. Nico Nico Douga (2015). School-Live! - Episode 1 "Beginning". [video] Available at: https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/1436342441 [Accessed 30 Nov. 2018]. Salvato, D. (2017). Hello, my name is Dan Salvato. I created Doki Doki Literature Club. AMA : DDLC. [online] Reddit.com. Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/DDLC/comments/7dvb70/hello_my_name_is_dan_salvato_i_ created_doki_doki/ [Accessed 30 Nov. 2018].

Twitter.com. (2018). Team Salvato on Twitter: "Only one more day to vote for DDLC in the SXSW Gaming Awards! http://teamsalvato.com/blog/vote-ddlc-for-the-sxsw-gaming-awards/ … Also, DDLC has reached 3 million downloads!". [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/TeamSalvato/status/970018054141755392 [Accessed 30 Nov. 2018]. The Sixth Sense (1999) Directed by M. Night Shyamalan [Film]. USA: Hollywood Pictures. En.wikipedia.org. (n.d.). School-Live!. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-Live!#cite_note-48 [Accessed 30 Nov. 2018]. Clue (1985) Directed by Jonathan Lynn [Film]. USA: Paramount Pictures.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Pineda, R. (2015). Gakkō Gurashi! Zombie Anime's Cast, Lerche Staff, Summer Debut Revealed. [online] Anime News Network. Available at: 9 https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2015-02-23/gakko-gurashi-zombie-anime -cast-lerche-staff-summer-debut-revealed/.85295 [Accessed 29 Nov. 2018]. Team Salvato (2017) Doki Doki Literature Club! [Video Game]. Available at: http://ddlc.moe/ [Accessed 30 Nov. 2018]. Ochss, A. (2017). Watching Vs. Actually Playing: What's More Enjoyable?. [online] The Odyssey Online. Available at: https://www.theodysseyonline.com/watching-vs-actually-playing-whats-more-enjoyab le [Accessed 30 Nov. 2018]. sakugabooru (2017). ANIME FINANCIALS 2016. [image] Available at: https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2017/01/02/anime-financials-2016/ [Accessed 30 Nov. 2018]. Danganronpa.us. (2018). Danganronpa™: Trigger Happy Havoc. [online] Available at: http://danganronpa.us/danganronpa/home.html [Accessed 30 Nov. 2018]. Hodgkins, C. (2013). NISA Licenses DanganRonpa. [online] Anime News Network. Available at: https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2013-07-06/nisa-licenses-danganronpa -demon-gaze-games-in-west [Accessed 30 Nov. 2018]. Gantayat, A. (2010). Spike Details High Speed Detective Action Game Dangan-ronpa. [online] Andriasang. Available at: https://andriasang.com/comnzv/danganronpa/ [Accessed 30 Nov. 2018]. Metacritic. (n.d.). Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc. [online] Available at: https://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-vita/danganronpa-trigger-happy-havoc [Accessed 30 Nov. 2018]. Metacritic. (n.d.). Clue. [online] https://www.metacritic.com/movie/clue [Accessed 30 Nov. 2018].

APPENDICES App. A - Anime episodes average 23 minutes - 90 seconds of these are used for the intro animation, and 90 are used for the ending. This leaves a show on average 20 minutes to tell that episode’s story. 20 x 12 = 240. 240/60 = 4 Hours of runtime for School-Live!. This is approximately the runtime, not counting Episode 12, where the opening and ending are not shown, adding an extra 3 minutes to relevant dialogue. App. B - Chart of the number of Anime shows broadcasted by year, (sakurabooru, 2017)